If
there's a more exhilarating, iconic and trend-setting opening sequence to a documentary feature than the one
that kicks off Dont Look Back, D.A.
Pennebaker's remarkable film record of Bob Dylan's 1965
English tour (his last as a solo performer), then I've
yet to see it. You may never have even heard of the
film, but I can guarantee that if you were presented with this sequence then a very large proportion
of you would let out
a head-tipping "Ooohhhh" of recognition. It
has been imitated, parodied, even adapted to sell Memorex
audio cassette tapes, and remains the supreme example of the
minimalist music video par excellence, despite
being made some years before there were music videos,
and not intended as a promotional tool to sell a tie-in album.
Set to Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues,
it features the singer standing in an alleyway holding
up a stack of A3 sized cards bearing specific words
from the song and peeling them off as it progresses, the words on the cards timed to match the lyrics as they are sung. If my description
is even halfway on the nose then many of you will be
making that "Ooohhhh" noise right now. It's
such a simple idea, but proves a great way to kick off
what remains to this day one of the very greatest rock
documentaries in cinema history.

D.A.
Pennebaker started out as a mechanical engineer and
was instrumental in helping to create the portable film
equipment that became essential to the birth of Direct
Cinema and Cinéma Vérité. He began
making short, inventive documentary works in 1953 with Daybreak Express, and like fellow directors-to-be
Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, he crewed for Robert
Drew, one of the movement's godfathers, on the 1960 Primary and the 1963 Crisis:
Behind a Presidential Commitment. But his real
break came in 1965 when he was approached by Bob Dylan's
manager Albert Grossman about the idea of making a film
about the singer's upcoming tour of England. Pennebaker,
though knowing little about Dylan, recognised the potential
in the project and saw it as an opportunity to make
his first made-for-cinema documentary feature.

Movies
about musicians can be divisive in a way that few other
films are, prejudged on the basis of musical taste that
can exclude them even from viewing consideration because
of who they are about. Thus a portion of the potential
audience here is going to see the words Bob Dylan and
engage their automatic bypass mechanism. Which would
be a real shame, as although a record of a concert tour,
this is no concert movie – Pennebaker includes only
as much or as little of a song as each scene needs, letting
a couple run almost for their entirety but cutting away
from others after only a couple of bars. The focus of
the film is not Bob Dylan in concert but how this young musician copes with the pressures
and responsibilities of fame. That he does so with almost
unwavering good humour is one of the film's most pleasant
surprises – there are none of Elton
John's colourful tantrums, no sign of the soul searching and ego-battles
of Some Kind of Monster, and there's an earthy
honesty that the likes of In Bed With Madonna can only dream of.

Nonetheless,
an appreciation of Dylan the writer and performer will
inevitably enhance your enjoyment of the material
here. Footage of Dylan rehearsing, warming up for a
gig, singing Hank Williams songs with Joan Baez, or (a
rare sight) composing on a piano is valuable in itself,
but it is his interaction with those around him that
provides the film's chief fascination, in particular
his dealings with the English press of the time. On
a historical and cultural level alone this is extraordinary
stuff, especially given the rise of youth-centred musical
news reporting over the past thirty years. The reporters
here – with their Middle England accents, formal suits
and unimaginative questions – have no connection whatever to
Dylan or his core youth audience, people a reporter
from the Manchester Guardian somewhat sweepingly categorises
as "bearded boys and lank-haired girls." The
only reporter who seems genuinely interested in what
Dylan is saying is the BBC's Africa correspondent, though despite growing up in Jamaica he too speaks as if born
to the gentry. A Time Magazine correspondent gets a
particularly hard time and the only young reporter
we see, who turns out to be a science student named
Terry Ellis who writes for a university magazine (and
was later to found Chrysalis Records), catches Dylan
shortly before he is due on stage and in playful but
unhelpfully argumentative mood.

Moments
of conflict are rare – a problem with sound at one of
the concerts, Albert Grossman rounding on a hotel manager
who is complaining about the noise, Dylan losing his
rag when one of his party throws a glass into the street
from the window of his suite – and the film develops
dramatically on moments of unity and collaboration rather
than confrontation. On arrival in the UK, Dylan is initially
bemused by the music press coverage of rising folk star
Donovan – "I'd like to meet him," he remarks,
and sure enough we later see Donovan in Dylan's
hotel room playing a tune for an appreciative audience.
A small group of fans gathered outside of Dylan's hotel
in Manchester find themselves invited in to meet
their idol and even Grossman is shown cooperating with
tour promoter Tito Burns to up the price for a TV appearance,
an interesting signpost to where the music industry
was heading.

In common with many Direct Cinema works of the time, the film was shot on high
grain 16mm with equipment Pennebaker himself had helped to
develop. There is a roughness to the image and at times
the camerawork (content was clearly more important to
the director than any visual polish) that still looks
edgy today, but gives the film an immediacy and intimacy
that gets us so close to Dylan and his crew at times
that we can't help but feel part of his troupe, and
we thus tend to see those he meets very much
through his (and Pennebaker's) eyes. Mind you, given
the somewhat stuffy nature of the establishment figures
he encounters, his youth, talent, humour and intelligence
make him an easily likeable figure and an inspirational
reaction to a very conservative establishment. On the
commentary track, Dylan's friend and tour manager Bob
Neuwirth notes that even during the shoot they became aware that Pennebaker was doing with film
what Dylan was achieving with music, bringing
something new and energetic to a format that had fallen
into mediocrity in the hands of establishment figures.
It comes as little surprise to hear that when Pennebaker
took the finished film to Warner Seven Arts in search
of a distribution deal, they were dismayed at what they
felt was the film's technical shabbiness. Boy must they
have been kicking themselves when it went on to become
one of the most commercially successful documentary features of all
time.

But
the film remains most precious for its off-guard moments,
the scenes where Dylan and friend Bob Neuwirth lose
their awareness of the camera (Neuwirth admits that
the two played up for the film crew at times), and a superb sequence in which Joan Baez sings an
achingly beautiful version of Dylan's Percy's Song while Dylan taps away an old typewriter, pausing at
one point just to sit and listen and gently bob to the
music. It's a captivating scene, and yet it contains no dialogue,
little in the way of obvious emotional response and
it's all done in a single hand-held shot. And yet, like
the final image of Paul in the Maysles brothers' Salesman,
it speaks volumes about the subject in the very quietest
of voices.

sound and vision

Shot
on high speed 16mm stock in available light, the print
here is high on grain and on contrast and a little fuzzy
on fine detail, but black levels are good and tonally
this is a solid transfer. Detail is not too hot in darker
areas, but this could well be an issue with the original
print, given that the conditions of filming were almost
never ideal. Dust and dirt are evident throughout, but
are not too bad and certainly not excessive given the
film's age and low budget 16mm origins. Occasional flickering
is caused by fluorescent lighting and even the camera
battery running low, and is thus no fault of the transfer.
On the whole, a very decent job that it would be hard
to improve upon, given the source material. The picture
is framed in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

The
Dolby 2.0 mono soundtrack is inevitably limited by the
filming conditions and the low budget, but restrictions
aside it's a reasonably clean job in which dialogue
is always clear and the music reproduced as well as
can be expected. The condisitions under which Pennbaker was forced to operate ensure that the camera motor is sometime audible, but given the
spontaneous, do-it-yourself nature of Direct Cinema,
this in no way detracts from the on-screen action.

extra features

Chief
among the special features has to be the audio commentary by director D.A. Pennebaker
and Dylan's friend and tour manager in the film, Bob Neuwirth.
Though not quite as rich in detail as the one on Criterion's
disk for Salesman,
this is nonetheless really valuable stuff, providing background
information on how the film and the tour came about, on
the equipment used, on Pennebaker's approach to the project,
and his relationship with the people he was filming. The
two even send up the immediacy of Direct Cinema at one
point, joking about how many takes it took to get a scene
right and what a pain it was to light, as a very spontaneous
and obviously unlit scene plays out on screen. Pennebaker
comments on the importance of the lightweight camera and
crystal-sync sound to the film, and made me laugh out
loud with when he described his tension at the film's second
screening for Dylan with the phrase: "I
was chewing a hole in the seat with my rectum." There
are a few small pauses in the chat here and there, but
the two men bounce well off one another, and this is a
very engaging and informative companion to the film.

Bonus
tracks consists of five complete audio tracks recorded during
the making of the film. All have been remastered for this
DVD and are very clearly and cleanly reproduced. The tracks
are: To Ramona, The Lonesome Death of Hattie
Carroll, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, It
Ain't Me, Babe, and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.
For Dylan fans, this is something of a treat.

The film trailer (1:47) is very simply
the opening Subterranean Homesick Blues sequence
with a bit of text at the end.

The "Subterranean Homesick Blues" alternate
take (1:51) is exactly that, the
opening card-dropping scene shot in an alternative location,
but still with Bob Neuwirth and Alan Ginsberg in the background,
though this time Ginsberg does a slightly distracting
clothing change. A very valuable extra.

Profiles provides brief biographies of Pennebaker, Dylan and photographer
Daniel Kramer, abridged filmographies and discographies
for Pennebaker and Dylan respectively, and Pennebaker's
own brief profiles of some of the cast and crew.

summary

Dont
Look Back (and yes, there is no apostrophe in
the tile) is a key work of American Direct Cinema and
a prime example of the rock documentary at its finest – though Neuwirth confesses that he and Dylan stage managed
some of the action, there is just as much here that is
honest and spontaneous. As a record of the man and the
times it remains invaluable, as documentary cinema it
is enlightening, compelling and always entertaining. A
hugely influential piece – almost all subsequent rock
documentaries owe a debt to the film – its shadow extends
beyond the documentary genre into advertising, music videos
and even fictional features, most notably Tim Robbins'
witty and scary political satire Bob Roberts,
which borrowed much of Dont Look Back's
structure and parodied several of its more memorable scenes.

Docurama's
DVD features a solid transfer, an informative commentary
track and a couple of nice bonus features. A must for
documentary fans and Dylan enthusiasts alike